INCULTURATION

All cultures have in one way or another deviated from justice. Human society, left to its own dynamics, has an apparently ineluctable tendency to structures of inequality and absolutize them. With the establishment of structures of inequality come the theories of legitimation, defending them, putting them beyond question or challenge, proposing them as the way things should be. Thus, we have a well - nigh interminable list of divisions, and polarities between the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless, the educated and the unlettered, masters and slaves, lords and vassals, kings and subjects, capitalists and the laborers, party members and the outsiders, citizens and foreigners, West and East, North and South, First World and Third World and so on. Structures of inequality and their absolutization continually produce marginalized groups in the society.

In most radical way in which Christian faith can be inculturated in human society, Asian or otherwise, is not a simple return to communal traditions but, rather by embracing what has come to be called the preferential option for the poor. Every society breeds its sufferer; to be in solidarity with victims is the perennial mission of the church. Never more deeply do the people make the Gospel their own, than when they learn to look upon the society from the perspective of the marginalized to give public witness of solidarity with them.

In the industrialized and more economically developed countries of Asia, oppression may come in different forms due to the culture brought about the technology. The growing reliance of technology can lead to the situation where it is allowed to create a dominant metaphors for understanding human existence. This would be the prelude to thinking that all human problems can be solved by value - free scientific procedures. The impact consumerism on peoples perception of reality can easily give rise to a culture where individualism and utilitarianism hold sway. Much of disorientation results when people lose the sense of belonging together, of having inherited a common good and of being responsible for cherishing and protecting it. Here again, it is the mission of the church to be in solidarity with the victims of a self-centered society.

When religious forms and symbols are pre - empted by the elite, inculturation comes to be understood largely in terms of the impact of Christian religion on that type of culture which is founded on leisure. The scope of inculturation is then limited to the belief and value system of the human community, outside their interaction with the livelihood and power system, where injustice and oppression may be at the basis of he leisure that is enjoyed by the few and the alienation suffered by many. The culture of leisure owes its existence to the culture of work and has the mission and responsibility, in solidarity with working people, to  oppose all structures of injustice  in the world of labor and to promote equality and participation of socio –economic and political life of the community. When ‘high’ culture –the culture of literature, art and liturgy-becomes an end in itself and is cut off from the culture of the poor, it quickly becomes insipid.

Where, then, is inculturation happening in Asia? It is happening most effectively at those critical points where the church is responding to its mission to be in solidarity with victims; it is happening where the church is giving public witness to its preferential option for the poor.

(To continued)